What's more, correctly attributing a cyber attack to a specific aggressor often is challenging. Anonymous learned this over the weekend, when it was quickly blamed for attacking and crippling spamhaus.org. The attack came this week after the anti-spam group warned that a Wikileaks mirror - wikileaks.info - is hosted on a Russian Internet provider that has a history of being friendly to a large number of domains associated with cyber criminal activity. When contacted at their IRC channel, several Anonymous activists denied that the group had anything to do with the attack on Spamhaus, and the topic in that chat channel had been changed to "We're not ddosing spamhaus". Meanwhile, spamhaus.org remained unreachable for some time.

Also see Bill Brenner's Stop calling it a cyberwar, you dummy post on the Salted Hash news analysis blog

This editorial isn't meant to denigrate or diminish the threat from . As Arbor's Labovitz noted, "the trend towards militarization of the Internet and DDoS used as means of protest, censorship, and political attack is cause for concern (the world was a simpler place when DDoS was mainly driven by crime, irc spats and hacker bragging rights). Overall, DDoS fueled by the growth of professional adversaries, massive botnets and increasingly sophisticated attack tools poses a real danger to the network and our increasing dependence on the Internet."

Instead, I hope the media will exercise a bit more restraint in tossing around volatile terms like cyberwar, particularly to describe the antics of a group that has a well-earned reputation for attention-grabbing stunts and lampooning just about everything. At best, such flattery may only encourage copycat attacks; at worst, it trivializes the far more serious issues raised by the Wikileaks scandal.

CSOonline contributor Brian Krebs previously covered security for the Washington Post. He blogs at www.krebsonsecurity.com.